Our Assignment

I've probably written more about the Internet in Linux
Journal than about
any other topic. Two of my longest and most cited pieces were both titled
"Saving the Net". The first was in June 2003, and the second was in
November 2005. Here's an excerpt from the first:

The Net's problem, from telco and cable industries' perspective, is it was
born without a business model. Its standards and protocols imagine no
coercive regime to require payment—no metering, no service levels, no
charges for levels of bandwidth. Worse, it was designed as an end-to-end
system, where all the power to create, distribute and consume are located
at the ends of the system and not in the middle. In the words of David
Isenberg, the Internet's innards
purposefully were kept "stupid". All the
intelligence properly belonged at the ends. As a pure end-to-end system,
the Net also was made to be symmetrical. It wasn't supposed to be like TV,
with fat content flowing in only one direction.

The Net's end-to-end nature is so severely anathema to cable and telco
companies that they have done everything they can to make the Net as
controlled and asymmetrical as possible. They want the Net to be more like
television, and to a significant degree, they've succeeded. Most DSL and
cable broadband customers take it for granted that downstream speeds are
faster than upstream speeds, that they can't operate servers out of their
houses and that the only e-mail addresses they can use are ones that end
with the name of their telephone or cable company.

And why not? These companies "own" the Net, don't they? Well, no, they
don't. They only "provide" it—critical difference.

Eleven years later, those companies are now solving that problem by
shifting billing for Internet services from a single monthly subscription
rate to billing for data traffic (the telco model) and for content (the
cable TV model). They're implementing both gradually moving television to
the Net—and turning the Net into mostly-TV in the process. Their
thinking goes like this:

The Net and TV are both just screens. In "Report: 90% Of Waking Hours
Spent
Staring At Glowing Rectangles",
The Onion writes, "staring blankly at
luminescent rectangles is an increasingly central part of modern life. At
work, special information rectangles help men and women silently complete
any number of business-related tasks, while entertainment
rectangles—larger and louder and often placed inside the home—allow
Americans to enter a relaxing trance-like state after a long day of
rectangle-gazing." So the distinction between watching TV and using the Net
hardly matters.

If you have a cable or satellite subscription, you can already watch many
networks—or all of them (we use Dish Anywhere)—on your laptop
or hand-held. Likewise, you can watch lots of stations and networks, also
with subscriptions, delivered via IP, the Internet Protocol.

Captive lawmakers have kindly allowed their overlords in the content and
transport industries to verticalize entertainment supply chains, making it
easy to shift TV from cable and satellite to the Net, while keeping the
existing billing systems intact and opening opportunities for many more.
Susan Crawford unpacked this nicely in Captive Audience: The
Telecom
Industry and Monopoly Power in the New Gilded Age.

Bandwidth is naturally scarce, and it costs a lot to build out
infrastructure, especially for mobile devices that can suck down 4K video
over cellular connections. Why not price the offerings accordingly?

And that's how Hollywood will finish body-snatching the Internet.

So, what does this mean for Linux? Won't we still be able to write code,
submit patches, participate in lists and so on?

Sure, but what else? What options will be foreclosed in a system that's run
by Hollywood and its allies at Apple, Google, Facebook and Microsoft—and the only software available for most people will be on the shelves
of company stores?

In a word, freedom. In Linux
Journal's bones is a belief that free
software, free hardware and free people are more valuable—to
themselves and to the world—than captive ones. We believe in openness
too, but freedom is the deeper, more essential and more personal virtue.
Freedom is embodied in the GPL v2 license that Linus chose for Linux at the
start, and which I am sure is one reason Linux succeeded to degrees other
OSes can only envy. Freedom is also in the hearts of Linux kernel hackers,
and many Linux developers and users.

But that population is a shrinking minority among professionals working
with Linux, simply because Linux is a huge success, and has enlarged the
general talent pool. That's why you see billboards yelling "Do You Know
Linux? WE ARE HIRING!" From the perspective of Linux 1.0, this is a dream
come true. Yet knowing Linux isn't the same as sharing the values that made
Linux kick butt. For some perspective on what's happening here, let's
revisit "A Tale of Three Cultures", which I wrote for the March 2002 issue of
Linux Journal. In it, I described what I saw as three different overlapping
constituencies, each with their own cultures (Figure 1).

Figure 1. Three Cultures

Lawrence Lessig drew the Geeks/Hollywood distinction in the June 16, 2002
eWeek, where he wrote, "There's a civil war brewing in my state of
California.
It is again a war between the Silicon Valley-based IT industry
in the North and Hollywood content and entertainment producers in the
South. Silicon Valley has become the target of punitive legislation being
pushed by Hollywood in Congress" ().
In August of that year, he said this to
the geeks assembled at an O'Reilly conference:

Creativity and innovation always builds on the past.

The past always tries to control the creativity that builds upon
it.

Free societies enable the future by limiting this power of the
past.

Ours is less and less a free society.

The title of Larry's talk was "Free Culture", same as the book he was
writing at the time. He was fighting against the expansion of copyright law
at the time. We (and he) lost that fight, because Hollywood controls
Washington. But never mind that. Mind instead the word
culture. That's what
we're talking about. We're kinda Libertarian in our approach to technology,
and we'd rather not screw around with "policy", as it's known in academic
circles.

Trending Topics

Webinar: 8 Signs You’re Beyond Cron

Scheduling Crontabs With an Enterprise Scheduler
11am CDT, April 29th

Join Linux Journal and Pat Cameron, Director of Automation Technology at HelpSystems, as they discuss the eight primary advantages of moving beyond cron job scheduling. In this webinar, you’ll learn about integrating cron with an enterprise scheduler.